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[RESOLVED] Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

I've been renewing my Spice software license ($$$) for nearly 20 years. Licensed users are eligible to log into the company's technical support page to request support. From the get-go I felt they designed that page to discourage customers from using it. The customer has to repeatedly fill out personal, license, OS, Version, etc information; when a valid license key should be all they need to identify me. The request form has over 30 *Required boxes to fill in!

This became such a nuisance that I created an automated WebBrowserControl about 10 years ago. It does nothing more than fill in all the required info leaving only the technical support question for me to type.

In short did I unwittingly violate VBForum's AUP? I sincerely hope not!

Chris

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Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

Strange you are even asking this question; you must have a guilt feeling about it. However, based on your statement I don't see how you could be violating VBForums AUP. What you do outside of here is not VBForum's concern and you have not opened a thread to ask questions about it so why would you be violating anything concerning VBForum.

Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

Originally Posted by Code Dummy

Strange you are even asking this question; you must have a guilt feeling about it.

No, I have absolutely no guilt feelings whatsoever. I've been plunking down over $300.00 bucks every year for the last 20 years for that software. There's nothing to feel guilty about. My app simply fills out redundant minutia that they already have on file.

Chris

BTW, you're new here. Assuming that I didn't open a thread regarding my app is just that.. an assumption. It was over 10 years ago!

Last edited by CDRIVE; Aug 21st, 2017 at 04:07 PM.

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Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

Yeah, you'd have to go back to the original post... where the OP asked how to use winhttp get/post to login to a website using vbforums as an example... and when questioned about it, got extremely defensive about it.

Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

Oh that's what we're talking about? His intentions became more clear later when he asked about rephrasing the boxing match (clearly for search spam for an illegal stream), but at the time I had a real problem with it. The issue seemed to be that it's unacceptable to use a program to autofill and submit a login, and that's really absurd. Say you're using something like LastPass, where it generates secure passwords to log into websites; it would be great to just go to say VBForums, and click login on it, and have it do the rest, instead of just entering the password. To me it, at the time, it seemed like the goal was more along those lines.
And I'm vehemently against restricting knowledge because it can be misused, and certain people here seem to go out of their way reading tea leaves to divine malicious intent. There really ought to be a higher burden of proof before shutting down a topic because of malware concerns, because right now it seems like the bar is 'that's something frequently used by malware' when it should be 'hey, this person really looks like they are creating malware'. The topic at hand offers a good example, there shouldn't be anything wrong with autologin because there's loads of legitimate uses (not to mention I have real doubts about TOS frequently telling people they can't use a password manager that just submits your login, something I've never even heard of as being prohibited); but then the other thread with the SEO manipulation and/or filter evasion for a pirate stream, that WAS clearly malware related and properly shut down. Big difference.

Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

I've been renewing my spice software license ($$$) for nearly 20 years. Licensed users are eligible to log into the company's technical support page to request support. From the get-go i felt they designed that page to discourage customers from using it. The customer has to repeatedly fill out personal, license, os, version, etc information; when a valid license key should be all they need to identify me. The request form has over 30 *required boxes to fill in!

This became such a nuisance that i created an automated webbrowsercontrol about 10 years ago. It does nothing more than fill in all the required info leaving only the technical support question for me to type.

In short did i unwittingly violate vbforum's aup? I sincerely hope not!

When I ask my service provider if that's against the rules, they state "That is your domain - you do whatever you want except damage our servers" etc.

But in the environment of a forum, you can not damage their furniture by doing this. The problem lies in another realm - to post spam - which what I got when started a forum for myself. A spammer have the opportunity to post 1000's of posts within a single day using proxies, different sub-nets and email accounts.

The "rant" was actually a "safe guard" for this forum and not against the learning curve of how to implement a program as such. There are hundreds if not thousands of these pieces of code to be found on the internet, in different (programming) languages, one has only to improvise a bit to write your own code.

I for one, will not bother about it much, because if the programmer wants to be a spammer, there's not much to prevent him/her to do so.

There's a lot of settings that a forum owner can set to prevent these spammers - within the forum settings and the server settings - it takes only a long time to do so and with a lot of knowledge.

Programmers are very patient people....while programming....but don't expect them to be patient all the time

Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

Originally Posted by Inside

But in the environment of a forum, you can not damage their furniture by doing this. The problem lies in another realm - to post spam - which what I got when started a forum for myself. A spammer have the opportunity to post 1000's of posts within a single day using proxies, different sub-nets and email accounts.

In my case a "Support Request Number" is generated when a paying customer requests tech support. This number is referenced throughout the email exchange. The request number is retired when the customer clicks a "Resolved" hyperlink contained in the emails.

Besides that fact, each new request must include title, full name, address, date purchased, email, phone number, order number (license number), software name, version number, date purchased, OS, request category and full description of problem. Any information mismatch or empty information cell will kick you off to an error page. If this happens no request is submitted and no support request number is generated. The error page doesn't even provide a back button to correct anything. The original support page no longer exists. The customer must mouse back to the app and click Help/Tech Support and start the whole damn process all over again.

I would think that it would be extremely difficult for a spammer because all the required information must match their files. I would also think that it would be easy for the company to limit how many requests can be submitted by any single customer per time period.

Cheers,
Chris

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Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

Originally Posted by CDRIVE

....Besides that fact, each new request must include title, full name, address, date purchased, email, phone number, order number (license number), software name, version number, date purchased, OS, request category and full description of problem. Any information mismatch or empty information cell will kick you off to an error page. If this happens no request is submitted and no support request number is generated. The error page doesn't even provide a back button to correct anything. The original support page no longer exists. The customer must mouse back to the app and click Help/Tech Support and start the whole damn process all over again. ...

Heck! but those guys are strict. Yep, I also would have written such a "auto fill" program long ago!

I would have probably written a stupid program with sendkeys or something

Programmers are very patient people....while programming....but don't expect them to be patient all the time

Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

In general, the rule is pretty simple: We don't permit questions about doing something that explicitly violates the acceptable use policy of a third party. Therefore, logging in automatically is not an issue as long as it is not an issue with the site to which you are logging in. Furthermore, the rules have not always been the same. For example, profanity rules were considerably more relaxed in the early years of this forum, back when it was just a guy running a forum. So, what was permissible ten years ago...I can't say.

Of course, a person can deny that what they are doing is against the acceptable use policy of some target, and can especially do so if they don't name the target. However, having been around the block a few times, it's pretty obvious when somebody is hiding something unless they are truly subtle. There are times when they have good reason to hide their true purpose, in which case they are free to discuss it via PM with a moderator. Otherwise, it is pretty reasonable to assume that a person who is deliberately trying to hide something has a reason to hide that thing. If, at the same time, their actions could be malicious or against the AUP, then it is also reasonable to assume that what they are hiding is being hidden because if it were not hidden it would not be allowed. This was a point proven in court near here. I believe the judge put it like this: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...it's a duck unless proven otherwise.

If what you are doing is legitimate, then be open about it. If you can't, then either don't talk about it, or talk about it via PM, but also consider whether what you are doing is right.

Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

If what you are doing is legitimate, then be open about it. If you can't, then either don't talk about it, or talk about it via PM, but also consider whether what you are doing is right.

Actually, it should be an open book found somewhere in my topics. The thread is probably over a decade old. Martin Liss, Hack and RobDog were keeping the peace in those days. I'm 71 years old now so my memory isn't as sharp as it once was. Though I do believe that I provided a link to the Tech Support page for those helping me decipher HTML script.

Thanks for the input.
Chris

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Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

Chris - I think in your case it's a bit more clearer, you were simply doing an autofill... what the other person was looking for was auto submittion, by passing the webbrowser completely... two completely different deals. Putting their posts together, it looks like they are trying to put together something to game the system to drtive up their site in the google rankings automatically by trying to manipulate how SEO works. But they way they're going about it seems less than kosher to me.

Re: Did I Violate a Forum Rule?

Yes TG. AutoFill is far more appropriate description of my app. On a side note that website has obviously not suffered any intrusions or spamming over the last 10 years. I say this because the only editing my VBP has received in that time is a yearly change is my software version, license key and rarely a change in my OS.

Thanks for the input,
Chris

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